Confectionery multinational Cloetta chooses Spectades for the implementation and integration of Infor EAM

You probably won’t recognise the name Cloetta, but you will recognise its brands: Red Band Venco, Läkerol, Sportlife, Lonka are brands of confectionery and chewing gum that can be found all over North-western Europe. Furthermore, Red Band’s premises on Spoorstraat in Roosendaal in the Dutch province of Brabant are a great example of industrial heritage and even a style icon, and this is where one of the Dutch factories of the Swedish listed multinational is established. With Spectades as its partner, Cloetta integrated the asset management program Infor EAM and the ERP program Infor M3 together. We took a look behind the scenes at the underlying reasons for this decision.

Willem van der Velde, as the Group Maintenance Manager at Cloetta, is responsible for this important step forward in automation. Van der Velde: “In my role, I support the Technical Managers at our seven factories in Sweden, Ireland, Slovakia, Belgium, and the Netherlands with the implementation of Asset Management. We were already using Infor M3 as an Enterprise Resource Planning system throughout the company. We use it to connect all of our business process (stock systems, company administration/finances and logistics) together so that all this information can be used throughout the company by everyone. This means that around 2,600 employees in 11 countries in that area can add to and use the same information.”

Assetmanagement

“However, this is not yet the case in the seven factories where we use various maintenance management systems for our buildings and machines. That is why we were looking for an asset management system that we could use in all of our factories and that preferably we could connect to Infor M3. There were two products in use that came into the picture. We set out the needs for this system with the Technical Managers in the factories. We then invited along the respective suppliers and tested the systems for futureproofing. The Technical Managers ranked the systems and this was how Infor EAM came out as the preferred supplier, combined with the mobile work office and the Spectades Planning & Scheduling tool.”

Infor EAM & Planning & Scheduling

For the implementation and integration of EAM and M3, Infor advised us to work with their local integrator, Spectades. Van der Velde: “We were extremely pleased with the Kickstart concept in which we could begin with a pre-configuration and then tailor it to our users’ requirements. The visual Planning & Scheduling tool that Spectades had built earlier was one of the most decisive arguments for us to choose Infor and Spectades. That is because this tool allows us as an organisation to deal with our most important asset, namely “our people”, in a more reliable and cost-effective way. Beginning with the Kickstart programme, we customised EAM together with our key users, ICT, and Spectades, included the Planning & Scheduling Suite, and performed the integration with M3 for the test site in Roosendaal.”

M3 & EAM

It is important for Cloetta to be able to fully roll out the integration and implementation of the systems to all of its factories. A simple example is to be able to do the procurement of parts and raw materials in M3 and then to be immediately able to find this in EAM, so that you are up to date with the stocks and it can also be calculated financially right away. Furthermore, the programs are available across the company in English, Swedish, Dutch, and Slovakian. “By centralising the procurement and registration we think that we will be able to achieve great benefits over time in terms of procurement and stock management”, said Willem. “Connecting the systems means that all of our business processes and staff and maintenance planning are integrated, and as a result all of our business processes are really connected to each other. This means that all of the information gathered is immediately available in the ‘mobile work office’, particularly because it enables us to allow maintenance staff to directly record things on their tablet and add photos where necessary. In this way, you avoid a mechanic having to quickly enter his scribbled notes into the systems at the end of the day. Furthermore, the Planning & Scheduling Suite clarifies your work and staff planning. It makes rapid planning and the deployment of the right people much easier than doing this in a separate system.”

Challenges along the way

Although M3 and EAM are both Infor products, it turned out that integrating the systems was not always plain sailing. “We needed a lot of collaboration between the people at Spectades and our ICT staff in Sweden. Spectades provided the necessary knowledge, manpower, and thinking power with various specialists, worked closely with our ICT staff, and the interactions with Maurice Lapré as the contact point were excellent”, emphasised van der Velde

Maurice Lapré: “I am the Project Manager on this great project. At Spectades, I guide our team that additionally consists of functional and technical specialists. I maintained direct contact with Willem and discussed the plans with him. Our specialists had direct contact with Cloetta’s ICT staff in Sweden”. Willem continued: “We had hoped that the systems would be fairly easy to ‘hook up to each other’ but a lot of additional custom work was necessary in close contact between our ICT staff and the Spectades team. For instance, the two systems actually spoke different ‘languages’ and meetings were always carried out electronically due to the Covid situation. We were unable to travel to each other and a joint international live session was not possible. This certainly did not make the integration any easier.” Maurice describes this in more detail. “We liaised with the client to found solutions that enabled both systems to communicate with each other together. Communication was more difficult than usual due to the coronavirus pandemic. We had extensive digital sessions with each other, but this is quite different to sitting around a table and getting to know each other through personal contact. However, the collaboration gathered steam and it turned out that the systems could be perfectly integrated using the custom solutions.”

Collaboration

Despite the challenges, we have now reached the point where we will be able to start live testing the integrated systems in Roosendaal after a successful User Acceptance Test. “We had many more requirements than during a standard implementation or integration. We wanted a custom solution in order to achieve optimum acceptance among our users, and we found Spectades to be a good partner for this. That is why I am grateful for the provisional result and I am confident about the test period in Roosendaal”, said Willem van der Velde.
Now we are looking to the test period in the former Red Band site on Spoorstraat in Roosendaal. The integrated systems will be run for three months and decisions will be taken about how and when to roll them out to the other factories in Sweden, Ireland, Belgium, Slovakia, and the second establishment in Roosendaal.

For more information about Cloetta and their delicious, well-known products, visit: www.cloetta.com/en/